Owing to advancement in wireless communication technologies, a wide variety of wireless signal transmission apparatuses, such as cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), notebook computers and the like, have found wide application in people's daily life. For users of the wireless signal transmission apparatuses, one of the concerns is the communication quality of wireless networks.
As a measure to provide better communication quality of the wireless networks, the multiple carrier transmission technology has been developed. In particular, the multiple carrier transmission technology utilizes multiple orthogonal subcarriers to transmit signals, so it has such advantages as a high spectrum efficiency and multi-path. Accordingly, the multiple carrier transmission technology (e.g., OFDM, SC-FDMA, MC-CDMA) has become one of the most important transmission technologies for the next generation of wireless communication.
Albeit of the aforesaid advantages, multiple carrier transmission often suffers from inter-carrier interference (ICI) caused by the carrier frequency offset, the Doppler effect and the like factors, leading to degraded transmission quality of transmission channels. Furthermore, generally, in order to prevent or mitigate degradation in transmission quality of the transmission channels caused by the interference, a technical means conventionally adopted is to make channel estimation on the transmission channels; however, it fails to take the inter-carrier interference into account, which dramatically decreases accuracy of the channel estimation and, consequently, affects the transmission quality of the multiple carrier transmission.
Accordingly, efforts still have to be made in the art to provide a solution that can effectively make channel estimation on the multiple carrier transmission and mitigate the inter-carrier interference.